Santiago Ríos

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EXHIBITION IN THE "AGRUPACIÓN ARTÍSTICA ARAGONESA" (february 27th till mars 14th 2014)

SANTIAGO RIOS “VIVIENDO LA MÚSICA”



In this exhibition I presented 57 pictures related to classical music, jazz, flamenco or African ethnic music. Most of them are made live, in some cases, on the concert program. Some of the larger format paintings were made in my studio with different techniques: watercolor, acrylic or oil.

I edited a CATALOGUE with the photos of any of the exhibited pictures and text of Anton Castro. The "Heraldo de Aragón" echoes the ephemeris publishing an article by the same journalist on opening day.

My thanks to the chamber choir Modus Novus, to which I belong, who performed at the opening of the exhibition with a couple of songs (see one of them)











With Jesus Blasco who helped me, together with Angel Pellicer, to set up the exhibition



Modus Novus performing at the opening























































THE PAINTER OF CONCERTS


Anton CASTRO


Santiago Rios (Zaragoza, 1943) is a painter of nature and music. Actually, it might be something like: nature has music and music has landscapes, melody, rhythm, the beat of the wind and the labyrinth of silence. Santiago adapts nicely to any format or technique. If his career is reviewed, it is immediately perceived that he is comfortable with oil, with acrylic, with watercolor or pencils, ink and markers. That said, we should emphasize something very particular: he loves music. For many years. Perhaps forever. I do not know if it has anything to do with his profession as mining engineer. Or rather his second job, and his long-lasting passion: painting. The workshop.


Painters are good listeners of radio news and, above all, of the songs. Moreover, Santiago Rios attends concerts as frequently as he can: classical music concerts, orchestra, chamber groups or two soloists, and has a good knowledge of the casts and of both classical and modern composers. He attends concerts and does it in a special way: with his pencils, his watercolors and with deep emotion, open to any suggestion, gesture or movement. He is not a diffident music lover: on the contrary, he is an agitated listener, ready to tremble, attentive, enthusiastic, passionate. And so, from that mindfulness, and that emotion, are born many of his paintings. He often uses programs (the Auditorium, the Philharmonic Society, which are his favorites, perhaps due to the profusion of white, as well as those from other venues) and as the show develops, as instruments talk to each other, he captures the spirit of music and the modes of the instrumentalists or vocalists. And also, of course, the hand flapping and mood of the conductor.


A man like him, so traveled and so curious, is interested in many other things: jazz, certainly, that music which ranges from Africa to America (all the Americas: the north, the Caribbean, Andean ...) and that came with such unusual force to Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century, in France and then in Spain. And he really likes flamenco, its rituals, its duende, its black sounds, the tumultuous energy of voices, from Mairena, El Cabrero, Camarón or Morente up to the more recent interpreters Carmen Linares, Miguel Poveda and Mayte Martín, to name but a few.



This exhibition is a new tribute to music. Something he has done at least once before, in 2006. Something he does almost daily, from the auditorium or near any other stage. In this show, full of tenderness and plastic adventure, we find those drawings (a pen, charcoal or pen) that say almost everything, which seem to trap music on the fly. They capture the staging, the order of the orchestra, the sound and fury of a symphony. They capture an atmosphere of ritual. We find orchestral groups or the silhouette of great figure of violin as the young Alma Olite, for instance. And there are echoes of jazz groups, violoncellos, the roar of the winds, the whiplash of pianos, dark voices that lit up the world with shredding and intensity. But not only that: there are the singers, the sound of guitars, which no one can silence. His work as a whole work proves many things: the gigantic enthusiasm of Santiago Rios. The musical heart of his strokes. The drive, ease, creative freedom, the pleasure of painting. His ability to capture the indefinable sound on the fly, as well as the abstraction of the notes. And it proves his versatility: at times he seems to follow Antonio Saura and his stylized black tones like birds made of scattered ink, or Paul Klee, or Federico García Lorca, the freest artist, so given to fantasy and to oneiric gesture. Or George Rouault, especially in those watercolors colorful and trembling: worked and refined color, loose and expanded, as a timeless rose.



Santiago Rios has a gift. And insight. And patience. When he leaves the concert he has already almost finished his work. He has mirrored in a stroke of pure visual synthesis the best portrait of beautiful Eliane Elias or the peculiar guitar scratching of Pat Metheny. Then in his study (or at the Goya Study which he has visited regularly for the past two decades), he culminates his picture: adds nuances, rounds it up, brings it close to his chimera and completes it the way he meant it to be: painting is an ideal, a note on a pentagram, energy generated by charisma and interpretation. Abstraction and figuration will amalgamate in Santiago Rios much in the same way as the wooden heart of a violin and the metal heart of a piano amalgamate.














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